The new human zoo - news as entertaiment - Illustration

Interview, Feb, 1994

LOOKING AROUND, we can clearly see that television's old made-up ways of showing how human beings exist together are being replaced by something else. It was from television shows like Father Knows Best that the myth of a white-picket-fenced-in life with no rough edges or dark corners turned into a form of modern mass-cultural identity. Well, as we all know, something else has always been happening on the other side of that fence: reality. And on television, that reality is finally getting the play it deserves.

Over the last few years the magnetic power of television shows like A Current Affair and cable channels like Court TV to attract an audience across the nation and around the globe has enabled them to leap over other forms of entertainment. Who would have thought, years ago, that the content of these shows would be considered a form of entertainment as well as of voyeurism? Yet by revealing the animal side of human behavior, trial by television has the whole world watching. This may be a new way of capturing the call of the wild around us, but it is also a new way of exposing the anger and frustration and confusion that the world today seems so filled with. Maybe our fascination with Court TV and shows like A Current Affair and with the new species of celebrity they are creating from those who symbolize the abuse--and abusers--of this world comes, after all, from the recognition that the greatest show on earth is still the one that lets us see inside the cage.

THE BUTTAFUOCO-FISHER SAGA:

Surely there are many reasons why so many people were captivated by the story of a teenage girl who shot the wife of her lover, and by that of a wife who stood by her husband even after his infidelity with her attacker became a matter of public record. Is it because we recognize in this story how truly all-consuming human passion can be? Could it be that, for some people, the unconditional love Mary Jo Buttafuoco showed toward husband Joey gives new meaning to the phrase "never having to say you're sorry"? Or do we find in this love triangle the pain and the animalistic search for pleasure that are part of a peculiarly American consciousness, from the stories of Raymond Carver to the music of Meat Loaf, of the grand suburban tragedy? The reasons go on and on.

THE DICK OF THE YEAR AND THE YEAR OF THE DICK:

Perhaps only if Mia Farrow had cut off Woody's woody would there have been anything to rival the Bobbitts' story for its ability, as public spectacle, to draw to the surface the fear and distrust--and the instinctual awareness that the victimizer isn't always the one who wields the knife--that lie behind the gender gap in this country. Like the photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe that a few years ago brought to light a largely unrecognized form of pleasure and pain focused on the male body, the recurring image of the eight-inch fillet knife Lorena Bobbitt used to dismember her husband, John Wayne Bobbitt, has become a lightning rod for a kind of communication rarely heard in this country.

THE MENENDEZ DRAMA:

Among the many amazing aspects of this trial is the way it shows how Hollywood--where so much of our culture's fantasy life is created--can produce, in the story of an entertainment executive and his wife, gunned down by their young, attractive sons, a real-life version of the great escape from parental control, financed by a $14 million estate. Whether it turns out that these two are Hollywood's hottest young cold-blooded actors, as some say, or the victims of years of abuse by their parents, as the Menendez brothers contend, what's for sure is that everyone's watching them. How could we not be glued to a family drama so primal, where what is real and what is imagined in the interactions between parents and children put us all on the edge of our couch analyzing what is timeless in human nature, or what is so sick about our consumer culture, as a possible motive for murder?